Saturday, April 14, 2012

In the previous post, we looked at the evaluation system of TOPIK essay section. If you remember I had left you with three model essays which were written by three different students in 25th TOPIK. Here in this post, we will see how the examiners evaluated and graded those papers. Analyze the evaluation charts properly and try to find why one essay got more marks than others. I hope it will help you make your TOPIK essay better and get some more marks. All the best...

Here is the essay question that came in beginner level off 25th TOPIK:

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

The readers of TOPIK GUIDE have frequently been writing to me for some guidance on the Essay writing part of TOPIK 쓰기 section. So Here I am putting this detailed article about this.

Most of the questions in TOPIK are multiple choice and objective type where there is, clearly, only one correct answer. You don't even need a human being to check if the answers are right or wrong. Mostly OMR recognition softwares do the job. The problem is with the subjective type questions. In these questions there is no 'one correct answer'. Different persons can give different answers and they all may be correct. Sometimes it is difficult to even say whether the answer is right or wrong because it may be partially right and partially wrong.

This type of questions generally appear in the Writing section of TOPIK. And believe me, these are not difficult only for you. Evaluating this type of questions is the most difficult task for Examiners. As these questions are evaluated by real human beings and not the machines, there are high chances of variation in evaluation process depending upon the personality and mental status of the evaluator. And that"s why it confuses the test takers on what and how to write the answer of such questions so that it look correct to the evaluator. Particularly, the Essay writing part is the most difficult of these subjective questions.